What year does Where No Man Has Gone Before take place?

[uniderth]

I am not getting the physics of all of this entirely. What does all of this mean as to when the SS Valiant was launched from Earth?

There is distance between the location where the Valiant was launched, lost, and destroyed.

Time must pass from the time the Valiant was launched, to when it was lost, to when it was destroyed. This is because the Valiant must travel across that distance.

That time is dependent upon the velocity of the Valiant. That Velocity is dependent upon the technology available at the time of launch.

 

[Timo]

And if the journey was a slow one, it must have been a very long one, too, so the crew must have been surviving on something exceptional - cryosleep, perhaps, or then generations being born and dying. But the episode makes no mention of such.

Whichever way one looks at it, getting to the fictional "edge" of the galaxy in just 250 years from now is fantastically good going. That it would happen just 50 years from now is pretty difficult to accept, even though we know from other episodes that Earth in Star Trek made better space technology progress than our Earth in the 1960s already.

But if we wait until past 2063 before launching the Valiant, things become massively more plausible, because after that date, we can get help from advanced space aliens! For all we know, said ship was the former Vulcan garbage disposal warpship VSS Decrepit originally, sold to Earth at the price of five decades of absolute global servitude rather than scrapped...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

Fitting The Valiant into TOS history (in light of later spinoffs) has always been problematic due to the "over two centuries ago" comment by Kirk and the extant date of Cochrane's warp flight.

Sleeper ships with the post-2018 speed improvements, sent to colonise nearby star systems is certainly worth considering as an option. Perhaps the ship went off course and drifted for decades? And anyway, there's always the "ion storm" fudge factor which could carry the ship whatever distance the plot needs it to go!

 

[Timo]

We have to consider what it means for a ship like that to "disappear". Surely disappearing would be the default mode of operations for ships unless they had some realtime way of communicating with home base. Without such way, the date of disappearance should automatically be either the day of departure, or the day of scheduled return.

Was realtime subspace communication available right from the start (2063) or perhaps even before said start? If not, then nailing the disappearance date to 200 years ago in the history books should mean the ship was on a short duration mission with a scheduled date of return, rather than on an open-ended colonization run that might be a complete success even if never reporting back.

And anyway, there's always the "ion storm" fudge factor which could carry the ship whatever distance the plot needs it to go!

The dialogue doesn't directly support the idea that the storm would have propelled the ship across all that "impossible" distance, only that it whisked her across the Barrier and necessitated the destructive return attempt. But the dialogue doesn't contradict that interpretation, either - and the more role the "magnetic storm" played, the better it fits the "impossibility" of the ship's presence at the location.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

And there are grades to this. "A few hundred" may be anything, really. "Three hundred" may be a misspoken two or four, but probably not one or five. 35 may be more specific than 30, being a case of "rounding to the closest five" against "rounding to the closest ten" - yet "275 years" is probably less specific than "270 years", as the former really denotes nine quarters of a century and thus is only accurate to the degree "quarter of a century" is, while 270 should ideally mean something between 266 and 274.

Then there are cultural differences. "Forty nights and days" is really just saying "a lot of nights and days", in a nondecimal system where "hundred" did not hold any special position as the marker for "a lot" yet, but the literally more "handy" (and footy!) forty did.

The challenge today is telling the "it happened a century ago" references in the Trek timeline from the "it happened in 2215 specifically" ones... Trek does have its share of the latter. So, quick, which category does the "sublight propulsion got better in 2018" one belong to...?

Timo Saloniemi

Also, my 40-year high school reunion is this weekend. We've been talking about it on facebook, saying "40 years ago this, 40 years ago that..." Well technically we went to high school for a span of four years that ended 40 years ago. So some event we're discussing happened forty-TWO years ago, or forty-THREE.

I also talk about how my father was in WWII 70 years ago. He was actually in the air forces from 1943 to 1946, and in combat in the Pacific only in '44 and '45. So an event I'm talking about may have been in the summer of '44, 71 1/4 years ago.

So even if it's only a few decades ago, we're still rounding off.

 

[uniderth]

We have to consider what it means for a ship like that to "disappear". Surely disappearing would be the default mode of operations for ships unless they had some realtime way of communicating with home base. Without such way, the date of disappearance should automatically be either the day of departure, or the day of scheduled return.

That's the kicker there. Disappearing would be the default mode. With sublight communications it would take four years to get a message from Alpha Centauri to earth. The fastest way to communicate would be to send a message on a passing Vulcanian ship that is headed for earth.

It's possible that Earth didn't know the Valiant had gone missing until fifty or so years after it was launched.

So they probably took the sent date from the most recent message from the Valiant and said they were lost shortly after that.

I've been writing a story for the Valiant. In my story it goes like this:

The Valiant is converted from an old cargo ship. It launched in 2064 or so. The Valiant first tested its systems by traveling to planets in the Solar system. Essentially sending a message to the solar colonies that Earth is back as a power in the solar system. After that the Valiant heads to Alpha Centauri, Bermnard's Star, Tau Ceti, and Vulcan.

The Valiant visited Sirius but something happens there and the Valiant ends up near Delta Vega. While attempting to return home, the Valiant gets caught in the magnetic storm. the storm knocks their warp engines offline and they try using their impulse engines to escape but they aren't strong enough.

The Valiant is the stuck for years in the magnetic storm as they get swept half a light year out of the galaxy. After they get thrown clear of the storm they repair their warp engines and head back into the galaxy.

Traveling through the galactic barrier at warp speeds has an adverse effect and most of the crew are killed. But one recovers and begins developing strange supernatural powers.

 

[Mytran]

The kicker (as always) is that Kirk is quite specific that Valiant has been lost for OVER two centuries. In the story you outlined above, I'd have expected the mission to last several years at least after her launch, before the final disappearance.

 

[uniderth]

Well to be technically correct all you need to 201 years. Push the Valiant launch forward my a year or two (2063-2064) and push WNMHGB back a year(2066) and you can get yourself 203 years. That's over two hundred years.

If this is the case than in my story the Valiant has a good two years to get lost at Sirius.

Although there could be some interesting story possibilities if the Valiant was perhaps a sublight ship destined for Alpha Centauri and got lost. Then it could have disappeared in the early-mid2000s. I don't think there is anything the WNMHGB that specified the Valiant as having warp drive.